The Spectacle Blog

Observe that the WSJ editorial on the weekend -- “Ports of Gall” -- summarizes in cogent prose the facts of the matter of the port imbroglio. I mention that in the course of last week’s report, I learned that the jingoism, demagoguery, and base poor research by members of Congress are a sizable threat to rational political discourse.

The facts are that there are four major terminal operators on the planet. Number one is a private owned but China/> based firm from Hong Kong, Hutchinson/>, and will not do business in the U.S./>/> because of the unions and the shoddy port political environment. Number two and three are a Singapore/> government-owned entity and a privately owned entity from Denmark/>/>. With the DP World purchase of P&O, it becomes number four in the world.

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney appeared on Fox News Sunday this morning. Here are the highlights:

-Speaking about the new prescription drug benefit: "We need to find a way to reduce the entitlement burden."

When the Massachusetts governor is more fiscally conservative than our Republican president, things are seriously wrong at the top.

-Romney's explanation of his evolving abortion positions was fairly weak. Though unwilling to be pinned down, he suggested that he concluded that human life begins at conception while researching the embryonic stem cell issue. Props to him that he now recognizes that fact. But his statement that he believes abortion belongs in the hands of the states and thus he wouldn't mess with Massachusetts's laws doesn't wash. As governor, he's the right person to help change state laws. To get elected, he took that off the table. He'll have to answer for that.

Signals source warns that the Friday prayers in the ummah were united in the charge that the Samarra shrine bombing was the work of the American invaders and their infidel heretical secular agents in the Baghdad government.

This accusation was the same in the Sunni and Shia mosques. The charge is that the American crusaders have concocted to favor the non-Islamic elements in the elected officials -- by this is meant al-Jaafari of Dawa, Allawi of the INA, Talibani and Barzani of the Kurds, likely also al-Hakim of SCIRI. In sum, all the elite of the U.S.-backed Parliament.

Melinda Liu, Newsweek Beijing Bureau Chief, spoke at SAIS on Thursday on the Chinese attitude post-Iraq. She was engaging in that regard (read the fuller account here) but particularly notable for her comments on Nepal, where the Maoist rebellion is blighting a country one State Department researcher described as proof that low economic development and abject misery were not doomed to go hand in hand. Liu described the determination of longtime expatriate friends in Nepal that the Maoists would gain the upper hand and make Nepal unliveable; they had already made arrangements to leave the country, having spent decades there in peace. Beijing, ironically, wants good terms with any Nepalese regime but feels a certain awkwardness toward Nepal's bands of fanatical throwbacks. "Straight outta the 50s," Liu said, Nepal's Maoist movement is complete with armed women's groups, austere uniforms, and communist dance circles. But for all the kitsch, Nepal is descending into what Liu flatly described as a "mess." What are the implications for the China-India relationship?

Reagan created the radio address, writing the scripts himself quite often, as I understand. He aimed at evoking the spirit of FDR, and, being Reagan, he succeeded. Ever since, no President has felt secure enough to stop doing it, though nowadays I truly see no point in it.

There's a certain style of pitch-black humor -- one often encounters it among Eastern Europeans of a certain age -- that seems to sustain people caught under illiberal thumbs. Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh serves up a classic slice:

There was a solidarity rally in front of the Danish embassy in Washington. The rally was led by Christopher Hitchens. I'm thinking of organizing the same rally in Cairo. I just need 70 bodyguards, 3 armored humvees, plenty of tear gas, and 3 helicopters to immediately airlift the participants in case things got nasty. If you would like to participate please register your name by sending an e-mail to suicide.mission@yahoo.com

Jed, I agree with your point below. But this gives me an occasion to express my bafflement over the President's radio address. In my few years, never once have I been surfing the radio dial on a Saturday and found the President opining. Maybe some older (by older, I mean that Reagan was president when I was born) AmSpecBloggers can shed some light: was the President's radio address once regularly and widely broadcast? Is this an anarchronism, now only useful for slow-news weekends and sound-bite excerpts?

Well, we've had a busy week, haven't we? One of Shia Islam's principal shrines has been blown up, a port operator from an Islamic nation is about to take control of six American ports, the Philippines is in a state of emergency and -- surprise, surprise -- Hamas is going to get buckets of money for its terrorist government. With all this going on, you'd think that ol' Dubai Dubya would say something about them in his weekly radio address tomorrow, right? But nooooo.

I can assure you, your expectations will remain unfulfilled. Can't say what's in the embargoed release, but I can assure you of what isn't: ports, Iraq and pretty much everything that's important. The wartime leader we saw ever so briefly last fall has again benched himself. This is not a matter of going wobbly: it's the functional equivalent of abdication.

Nice turnout for the Danish Solidarity rally today, including two of your AmSpecBlog correspondents, James Poulos and myself. Christopher Hitchens was there, of course, along with Andrew Sullivan, Bill Kristol, Cliff May, Tony Blankley, and occasional TAS contributor Sean Higgins. Afterwards James and I joined Andrew, Hitch, and Richard Miniter (plus the female companions of the latter two) for a long lunch, during which I learned how far people had come for the event: One woman drove up from North Carolina, and an Iraq War veteran came in from California.

The American Spectator Foundation is the 501(c)(3) organization responsible for publishing The American Spectator magazine and training aspiring journalists who espouse traditional American values. Your contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. Each donor receives a year-end summary of their giving for tax purposes.